It is no easy task to find a suitable name for the ensemble of four buildings that Bob361 has inserted into an existing block in the south of Brussels. The infill development deftly navigates around familiar building typologies and encompasses a range of spatial principles that together provide a fitting response to an unusual brief. The result is a hidden neighbourhood that unfolds around newly created public space, with sustainability and ecology as its key themes.

These themes are embedded in a bold and radical spatial intervention: the design opens up the previously inaccessible heart of an existing block of buildings, which lies wedged between two busy and unpleasant roads. This block is bisected by a new pedestrian zone that divides the interior space into a number of fragments surrounded by a pleasant shelter that cannot be found on the outer side of the block. This intervention creates a situation in which front and back are not always distinguishable from one another; yet it is precisely where new accessibility meets residual spaces and back gardens that surprising (and also promising) encounters between old and new arise.